To understand why Tumblr suddenly brought an end to its original-journalism project, Storyboard, after just a year, it helps to consider what outgoing Facebook managing editor Dan Fletcher told an audience at Washington State University last month.

Speaking to the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication, Fletcher said Facebook “doesn’t need reporters” because it already has a billion content providers, as MediaShift reported.

“You guys are the reporters,” said Fletcher. “There is no more engaging content Facebook could produce than you talking to your family and friends.”

That statement is the perfect encapsulation of Tumblr’s challenge with Storyboard, an enterprising idea to produce original stories for partner publications based on what’s happening inside the Tumblr community. Tumblr is now host to more than 100 million blogs. It is an incredible platform for creation, curation, and social sharing. More content is not exactly what it needed.

Tumblr itself had trouble defining its Storyboard project from the start. At the time of launch, Storyboard executive editor Jess Bennett, formerly of Newsweek and the Daily Beast, described it like this:

“Tumblr has 90 million users. Those users are creating and observing and partaking in all sorts of fascinating culture. If you think of Tumblr like a city — a really big city, with a really high proportion of teenagers — then Tumblr Storyboard is like the local newspaper (though we’re more like a magazine) for that city. Get it? Kinda?”

While those pieces all qualify as “journalism,” they are also, effectively, something else: branded content. What benefit would Tumblr otherwise get from investing in an editorial department and then handing out its stories to other publications?

Indeed, as Storyboard’s editor-in-chief Chris Mohney told Capital New York, while the Tumblr stories were very much traditionally reported, “What we’re doing is marketing as journalism.” The idea was to show off the work being done by Tumblr’s community members and incentivize creative people to publish their best work on the platform.

But there is a problem with a platform that also tries to “do editorial,” which is likely something Facebook is also finding out with its similar project, Facebook Stories, envisioned as a place to “celebrate great stories” that take place on the social network. In his address at Washington State University, Fletcher, who is leaving Facebook to join a media startup, said it can seem “weird” for the company to communicate with readers through branded content.

“Facebook is meant to sort of fade into the background,” Fletcher said. “When Facebook starts producing content, it takes you away from that mindset.”

At their core, Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter are sharing networks, not publishing companies. They act as platforms for other people’s content, which can be spread rapidly and massively among their communities. A consequence of being walled gardens that restricts this sharing activity within their own properties, however, is that they give up the right to decide when and how that content breaks free into the wider public discourse. Even though it had success with its partnerships program at placing stories into other forums, Storyboard’s stories always had the whiff of marketing, or what is these days being described as “native advertising.” As we now know, that ultimately did not work out for Tumblr. Going by Fletcher’s comments, perhaps Facebook Stories will meet a similar fate.

LinkedIn, on the other hand, understands its role as a platform, even as it pushes to make content a core part of its business. Its iPad app is effectively a personalized news reader, with a social network lying underneath it. LinkedIn, however, isn’t in the business of commissioning its own content. Instead, it hosts and distributes content produced by third-party publishers, serving up a daily dose of business-related news that makes sense for its network of professionally-minded members. Yeah, it has a new blog section for “influencers,” but that’s about gathering an audience around independent voices hosted on the platform, not about telling stories about LinkedIn.

That is a savvier sort of “branded content” than the approach taken by Facebook and Tumblr, because the value is implicit in the network. It’s a classic case of “show don’t tell.” Plus, it opens up the possibility for letting other parties pay for LinkedIn to publish their own branded content , turning the company into a potentially powerful media business.

It’s sad for Tumblr’s hard-working editorial team that Storyboard has met an abrupt demise, but it might well be the consequence of a realization that platforms should stay away from doing their own editorial. That’s not their core competency, it’s not what their users turn to them for, and it ultimately can’t be seen as anything other than marketing in disguise.

Faced with a mission muddle, Tumblr CEO David Karp may just have come to conclusion that 100 million blogs is more than enough. The company will do just fine by leaving the storytelling up to its community.

Facebook has introduced Scrapbook, a new feature that allows parents to share and collect images of their children in one place without requiring them to worry about tagging their kids’ face with each other’s names just to make sure they don’t miss what the other person has posted. [Source: Facebook]

“For all the clumsy rhetorical lip service [former Yahoo News head] Guy Vidra pays to The New Republic’s hallowed intellectual traditions, this is what his vision of a nimble digital news product finally translates into: a vaguely journalistic veneer strategically designed to conceal a rancid interior of ‘elevated’ advertising.”

Indian e-commerce company Flipkart is said to be raising $600 million in its latest bid to compete with Amazon. The company is also said to have garnered a higher valuation with this funding round — quite the feat, considering it was previously valued at around $11.5 billion. [Source: The Economic Times]

Here comes another unicorn: Sprinklr, a New York-based marketing company, has raised $46 million at a $1.17 billion valuation. The funds will be used to help the 700-person company expand its marketing platform. [Source: Fortune]

Curator, the tool Twitter created so the media could find and share tweets with its audience, is now available to the public. Because if there’s anything people wanted to see more of, it’s tweets randomly inserted into blog posts, television spots, and other forms of media. [Source: TechCrunch]

A court in France has decided not to ban Uber’s low-cost services until the country’s highest appeals court, or its supreme court, weigh in on the constitutionality of a new transport law. [Source: The Wall Street Journal]

Tinder is refocusing on its spam-fighting efforts in the wake of reports that movie studios are using the service to promote their movies, scammers are attempting to steal information via the app, and pranksters have created tools that trick heterosexual men into flirting with each other. [Source: The Verge]

Uber offers drivers whose accounts have been deactivated a choice: attend a class that requires them to pass an exam, or take a class that doesn’t. The latter has been informed by Uber employees, and the company has sent thousands of drivers to it, according to a report from BuzzFeed. Why is that a problem? Because Uber isn’t supposed to provide its drivers with formal training; doing so makes them bona fide employees, not independent contractors. [Source: BuzzFeed]

Flipboard users will now be able to collect articles and share them via private magazines visible only to members of certain groups. The feature is aimed at students working in the same class, companies sharing press coverage, and other groups that might want an easy way to share Web pages with each other without having to use public tools like Facebook or Twitter. [Source: Flipboard]

T-Mobile has tasked its customers with creating a real-world coverage map that makes it easier to tell where its service works and where it doesn’t. Instead of guessing at where its customers will get service — which is what other carriers do, the company claims — it’s asking people to verify its predictions so it can be more honest with consumers. [Source: T-Mobile]